AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun
March 13, 2016
Simon Plant
Herald Sun
TIM Minchin feels “sorry” for Cardinal George Pell and has defended his contentious number about Australia’s highest ranking cleric as a “cheeky little pop song’’.
The comic musician, in Melbourne today for Thursday’s premiere of Matilda The Musical, wrote “Come Home (Cardinal Pell)” in the “language of anger’’, urging the religious leader to fly home to Australia and give evidence into a royal commission into child sexual abuse.
But after hearing Cardinal Pell give evidence in Rome, where the cleric also met with survivors of abuse, Minchin said: “I feel sorry for (Cardinal) Pell in many, many ways but it doesn’t mean there wasn’t room for a cheeky little pop song.
“I’m really, really sad that he couldn’t say, ‘This was terrible, we were wrong, it (child sexual abuse) was systemic and endemic and we’re trying to improve and I was wrong with the Melbourne Response’.
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